May 28, 2014

This looks way cool. Some things that I spotted in my first viewing that weren’t explicitly pointed out by the narrator include:

curved walls!!!

trees that look like they’re from a swampy area with moss hanging down from the branches

the streetcar is operational

skills include grand piano and some kind of crafting at a workbench

Overall, it looks like the default town is based on architecture and styles found in and around New Orleans, right down to a model of the New Orleans St. Charles Line Streetcar. There will likely be more info at E3, and I am eager to see more.

May 18, 2014

What happens when 20 or more sims try to get through the same set of doors at the same time? They pile up and make things take way too long.

My sim is stuck in the middle of the crowd there, and she's very hungry right now (thus the red plumbbob above her). She's been stuck in this crowd for about three sim hours so far and it will probably take her another sim hour or two to get past everyone. There's not a whole lot that I can do other than reset my sim to get her out of there.

When sims bunch up like this, they try to take turns, but the algorithm they use is pretty bad and they all end up trying to step in front of each other all the time, which makes them stop and think about their position for a few minutes, which puts them in front of other sims that are trying to get by... Unfortunately, when the sim is at University, the Tuesday morning class is always at the student union building (which is seen here) and there are too many students that try to get in at once, so this pileup happens every sim week.

May 17, 2014

The Into The Future expansion pack adds a bunch of content that will make sims’ lives easier in the sim present. One of my favorites is the dream pod. It’s the same size and has the same functionality as all of the other two-person beds in the game, but it adds a few interactions as well. You can exercise a little more control over a sim’s dreams with the “Influence dream…” interaction, which could lead to consequences after your sim wakes.

With each selection, the sim will have either a bunch of smiley faces (for a positive influence) or a bunch of frowney faces (for negative) appear around her dream bubble to tell you what kind of result your influence has had on the dream. After enough influence is built up in either direction, the sim’s Zs will change color from white for a neutral dream to either green for positive or red for negative. If you send your sim to dream, you should always influence the dream to your desired outcome because when a sim wakes from a dream pod dream, the sim will almost always have something changed, either a trait change or some other effect, based on the dream; check the resulting dream pod moodlet for more information on what effect your sim has gained.

One thing that I’ve noticed with this interaction, however, is that the upper and right-most selections in this menu will (almost) always have a positive influence on the dream while the lower and left-most selections will have a negative influence. I’ve only had one instance where this wasn’t the case. In this screenshot, my sim is dreaming about close relationships, so the romantic rocket ship ride and the bacon ferris wheel will both have positive influence, while selling the car for cotton candy or washing the darks with the lights will both have negative influence. There is also a very limited set of influence interaction descriptions for every dream type, with only about 6 different texts in total (and they always show up in the same position on the selection menu). For me this takes away a lot of the fun of the influence and turns it into just a routine to create the dream outcome I want. In my games, I don’t even read the selections on this menu any more and just manipulate the dream as desired.

The dream influence routines could have been improved just by adding a randomizer into the menu selection to at least make me read which selections are where in the menu.

May 14, 2014

The Sims 4 team has been hard at work improving and finishing off the new version for this fall's launch. We've been promised that there will be some more info released at E3 this year (coming up in a couple weeks), but today we get another look at Create-A-Sim with this new video...

The teaser mention in this video is that we'll see more about the new build mode soon.